In The Ask generally there's a new relaxation to Lipsyte's writing, perhaps issuing out of a new despair. What does prose style matter, if nothing matters? His sentences have always been drum-tight, but now there's a deep, sick-making kick to his kick-drum. "I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness fell over me." This is the cheap gag revealing itself, and a great deal more besides, as expensive beyond belief. It's the kind of bathos-pathos-thanatos manoeuvre that Saul Bellow used to drop.

The Birmingham News remembers the city's departed City Stages music festival.